Desert Fathers and Mothers

The name Desert Fathers and Mothers is given to those early monks in the Christian Tradition who went into the desert in Egypt in the third century. Even though life then was probably much simpler than now, they were convinced that they could develop their inner life better in the quietness of the desert rather than in the distractions of the city.

Their thoughts on the practice of meditation and prayer have been passed down to us in the form of short sayings and stories. Many of these have strong resonances with the practice of mindfulness meditation. They emphaisize paying attention to thoughts, staying in the one place or the one activity, patience with one's self, compassion for others.

Abba Anthony said:
"When you sit quietly alone,
you escape three sources of distaction,
hearing, speaking and seeing.
The only thing you will fight the whole time
is with your own heart"

Quiet time

Plan to be surprised

Sometimes things don't go quite like you anticipated them.

Watched a movie the other evening in which the main character has a chance encounter in a bookstore opening up for him a chance of love and a new direction in life. At the end of the movie this line came up: "So instead of asking young people, what do you plan to do with your life? Maybe we should tell them this: plan to be surprised". It is probably better to cultivate the capacity to be surprised by life rather than think we can control it. Certainly I could never have anticipated the turns in my life which have led me to this day, or encounters which have happened along the way. You just do not what may lie around the corner, and often the things you find yourself hoping for, do not work out.

Despite this happening so often, however, we still find ourselves planning and hoping. It is almost too difficult to not seek things which we perceive at the time to be good for us. It is hard to distinguish the things which lead to genuine happiness or the things we should continue to fight for. And so all of us get disappointed once in a while? We live in an imperfect world and bad things happen. And despite our practice and our life experience, it still can take a lot of energy to cope.

Our practice can help. There are some types of disappointment which come from us leaning too far into the future, imagining a certain development which never really had the potential to emerge. Developing the capacity to live in the present is a counter-balalnce to that. Another thing which can give hope is the understanding that we are just seeing part of the picture. The end of the story is not written yet. We try to stick simply to the feeling of disappointment without adding a fully ended story.

All the major wisdom traditions state that growth can come from working with pain and disappointment. It can help us develop compassion for others, patience with ourselves and, most of all, wisdom about the fragility, unpredictability and mystery of this life. Keeping an ability to be surprised leads to openness to this mystery and lets us receive growth from places where we probably would not go freely.

If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.

Woody Allen

Stop Running

“Don’t turn away.
Keep your gaze on the bandaged place.
That’s where the light enters you.”

Rumi

This quote has been helpful regarding facing my fears. The earlier chapters of my book chronicle all of the disorders I experienced as a child and teenager-OCD, anorexia, substance abuse. I kept running away from the sadness and the depression, which would morph into these other illnesses. So when I finally sat tight long enough to feel the raw depression, that’s when I could begin to heal. As you know well, I think taking a moment of silence to pray or meditate or center ourselves everyday should be part of everyone’s treatment … because when we stop running, we are able to hear what we most need to be whole.

Therese Borchard, author of Beyond Blue: Surviving Depression & Anxiety and Making the Most of Bad Genes

Not keeping to the safe path

"Like a seed growing into a tree, life unfolds stage by stage. Triumphant ascent, collapse, crises, failures, and new beginnings strew the way.

For as soon as a man tries to escape every risk and prefers to experience life only in his head, in the form of ideas and fantasies, as soon as he surrenders to opinions of ‘how it ought to be’ and, in order not to make a false step, imitates others whenever possible, he forfeits the chance of his own independent development.

Only if he treads the path bravely and flings himself into life, fearing no struggle and no exertion and fighting shy of no experience, will he mature his personality more fully than the man who is ever trying to keep to the safe side of the road."

Jolande Jacobi

Media use and distractions

The Kaiser Family Foundation is a non-profit, private operating foundation focusing on the major health care issues facing the U.S. They conduct research on issues affecting health, including the effects of media usage on young people. This month they published a study which found a huge increase in TV, music, phone, computer, and video game usage among 8-18 year olds compared to just five years ago. The rate of increase also accelerated over those years. What was also interesting was the increase in multi-tasking in that age range, where people are using two devices at once, such as texting while watching YouTube videos or talking on the phone while watching TV.

This would seem to be the situation with adults also. It is quite easy to observe today that as soon as the television programme, meal or meeting gets less interesting, people pull out their Blackberries and iPhones and starting checking messages, mail or the net. Now that laptops are much smaller it is possible to work on them while watching TV, and working on them may entail social networking while actually writing a report.

It is clear now that the speed of technological advances is not going to slow down. If anything it will get faster, and we will increasingly live in a connected and media-saturated world. Although many of the advances are helpful it is not clear that all lead to a greater sense of calm. Indeed many studies show links between increased stress and the breakdown in work-life and home-life boundaries.

Mindfulness encourages us to pay attention to what is happening and to simplify our focus of attention. Continually practising being divided in our attention only strengthens the possibility of being scattered and having no sense of being centred. It can increase our sense of anxiety. So we can become aware of our urge to immediately check emails or send that text right now. It can be useful to interrupt the urge and see if our life will actually fall apart.

Ocean waves

Jon Kabat Zinn drawing attention to the normal way the mind is, which we come to notice especially when we start meditation practices.

“… the first thing you notice is how impossibly jumpy the mind is… it is very hard to pay attention to any one thing for any period of time because the mind is so agitated that it distracts itself virtually moment by moment. It doesn’t need outside distractions… And this is totally normal. Everybody experiences this as soon as they start paying attention. And then you think ‘Oh my goodness! I could never meditate because my mind is like a train wreck.’ But the fact is everybody’s mind is like that…”

Another description he uses is that the mind is like the ocean. It can be agitated by the waves and the activity on the surface, but deep down below the surface is calm and peaceful. What begins to happen in our mindfulness meditation practice is that we are able to drop below this surface movement and experience brief moments of tranquility. Over time, and with practice, these brief moments of tranquility become more extended.

Each meditation practice is a journey of discovery to understand the basic truth of who we are. In the beginning the most important lesson of meditation is seeing the speed of the mind. But the meditation tradition says that mind doesn’t have to be this way: it just hasn’t been worked with.

What we are talking about is very practical. Mindfulness practice is simple and completely feasible. And because we are working with the mind that experiences life directly, just by doing nothing, we are doing a tremendous amount.

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

Practice means always starting over

It is our attitude to practice which sustains us when we get discouraged or when the mind labels it "boring" or "difficult" or "going nowhere". The best attitude to have is that of "starting over" which takes the focus off a prescribed outcome and places it on returning again and again to the practice.

So just how do you practice starting over? Think of it as shifting your attention away from controlling the outcome and abandoning your usual reactions - criticizing, judging, complaining, and lamenting - to getting off track. You don't deny your thoughts and feelings, and you don't try to make them go away. Instead, you acknowledge them without making any judgments about them and with compassion for how difficult this moment is. You then follow the acknowledgment with what I call "and" practice, in which you say to yourself, "Yes, I just got lost, and now I'll just start over."

You develop the strength to start over because you're committed to moving toward your goal, not to being there. This is why I call it an attitudinal shift. Your goals matter because they give direction to your life, but your actual life happens in the endless stream of moments that occur between now and when, if ever, you reach your goal.

Ironically, the practice of starting over is a more effective way to achieve your goal than constantly fixating on it. That's because most of us are not very good at simply delivering results. For instance, if you are trying to lose weight, curb your temper, or cease being a workaholic, you already know what to do to stop the undesirable behavior, but you don't. Discouragement from your past and imaginings about how bad the future will be drain your energy and cause you to fail. When you embrace starting over as a practice, you focus instead on what you are doing right now and what you need to do or are failing to do. Thus, if you have agreed to take on yet another work project, you reverse yourself as soon as it dawns on you that it is too much. If you sense that you're losing your temper, you just stop. No drama; you just get right back on your path and start over.

Philip Moffitt Starting Over

Transformation

Monday was the feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul. It is a very famous example of change: blinding flash of light, depicted as knocking him from his horse, in a solitary, blind state until meeting with a wise man takes the "scales from his eyes". It is presented as very dramatic, almost instantaneous. And in some ways that is what we all seek - some event or encounter which will provide us with instant relief and comfort or the skills we feel we lack to make sense and success of our lives. It is as if we believe there is a secret chord out there somewhere that will be the missing part, and will complete the symphony which is our lives.

However, such a dramatic change is not the norm and was not even true for Saint Paul. We are told that he went out into the desert after this event to reflect and enter inside himself. Some writers say that there was a ten year gap between this event and his first activity. For him, and for us, change is a slow, gradual, patient process.

This evening, a new MBSR Course begins as we set out together on this slow process of change. Everyone comes with different expectations, from different places in their lives. It is true that sometimes a dramatic change or event in our lives can bring us to a Course like this, but it can also be a gradual growing awareness of the need for change or support. However we got here, we learn very quickly that we can begin afresh every day, every moment, because each moment, for the participants and for me, is a new moment, the only moment we have to live. This Course is a chance to turn towards what is deepest and best inside us, an opportunity to practice paying attention. Gradual paying attention, moment by moment, changes how we see life. In that sense it is a real conversion.

Destiny

When you are compassionate with yourself,
you trust in your soul,
which you let guide your life.

Your soul knows the geography of your destiny
better than you do.

John O'Donoghue

Meditation and Insomnia

Meditation may be an effective behavioral intervention in the treatment of insomnia, according to research presented in June 2009. Results indicate that patients saw improvements in subjective sleep quality and sleep diary parameters while practicing meditation.

The study divided participants with chronic primary insomnia into two groups. Primary insomnia is sleeplessness that cannot be attributed to an existing medial, psychiatric or environmental cause. One group practiced yoga and meditation while the other group, the control group, didn’t. At the end of the two-month-long trial, the patients who practiced yoga/meditation experienced improved sleep quality and sleep time. Sleep latency, total sleep time, total wake time, wake after sleep onset, sleep efficiency, sleep quality and depression all improved in the patients who used meditation. "Results of the study show that teaching deep relaxation techniques during the daytime can help improve sleep at night," said Ramadevi Gourineni, MD, director of the insomnia program at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Evanston, Ill.

Ramadevi Gourineni, et al. "Effects of Meditation on Sleep in Individuals with Chronic Insomnia" American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Abstract ID: 0874.

St Francis de Sales

Today is the feastday of Saint Francis de Sales. He is the patron of Geneva Diocese and was based in the lovely French town of Annecy. He was known for his gentleness and good humour. Sometimes religious practice can lead to a certain rigidity and severity of attitude. Not so Saint Francis.

I like this quotation from him. Sometimes inner peace is disturbed by one’s own mind, so mindfulness practice, in noticing our thoughts, helps keep an inner balance. It reminds me of the saying from Thich Nhat Hahn, Life is short so we should smile, breath and go slowly.

Never be in a hurry;
do everything quietly and in a calm spirit.
Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever,
even if your whole world seems upset.

Meditation

Sitting meditation is the most common kind of meditation, but we can also practice meditation in other positions, such as walking, standing, and lying down. When we wash clothes, chop wood, water the vegetables, or drive the car - wherever we are, whatever we are doing, in whatever position our body happens to be, if the energies of mindfulness, concentration, and insight are present in our mind and body, then we are practicing meditation.

We do not have to go to a temple, a church, or a meditation center to practice meditation. Living in society, going to work every day, looking after our family, are also opportunities for us to practice meditation. Meditation has the effect of nourishing and healing, body and mind. And it brings the joy of living back to the practitioner and to those in her life.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Ring the Bells

Watched the Hope for Haiti Concert last night. It was, on the whole, a dignified restrained affair. I found that the songs most suited to the tragedy were the older ones - John Legend's rendition of the Gospel song Motherless Child and Mary J Blige's gospel version of the incredible Hard Times Come Again no More. Justin Timberlake sang a nice version of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. These simple, sparse, songs spoke powerfully to the human condition when faced with difficulty. Let us hope that the Concert prompted people to give.

While listening I was reminded of Cohen's other song Anthem which anticipates his period spent as a Buddhist monk, and which, he says, contains the fundamental belief behind a lot of his songs. I feel it expresses a fundamental truth about all our lives. It reminds us that when we should not wait till we think we are perfect before we start to give. Each one of us are broken in many ways, and make mistakes. We all search for the cure that will bring us wholeness. But this brokenness is what ultimately allows real compassion for others in their weakness and pain. The greatest gift we can offer another is an acceptance of their real selves, not some ideal version of them.

The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen, Anthem


We are all substantially flawed, wounded, angry, hurt, here on Earth. But this human condition, so painful to us, and in some ways shameful- because we feel we are weak when the reality of ourselves is exposed - is made much more bearable when it is shared, face to face, in words that have expressive human eyes behind them.

Alice Walker, Letter to President Clinton

Develop positive skills

Remembering the positive side of everyday happenings can be a struggle for people suffering from clinical depression. But by developing skills to tune into the positive, depressed people can strengthen their mental health, a 2009 Ohio State University study shows. By staying mindful of the positive elements of daily events, and even documenting each days happiest moments in a journal, you may lower your stress levels. “Positive emotions build resilience to stress, in addition to having an undoing effect on depression” says Alan Keck, Psychologist at the Centre for Positive Psychology.

He goes on to say that we should consciously build up our positive resilience by really focusing when we are having an experience that we find especially pleasant. This may simply be a good cup of coffee, a special brunch, a visit to friends, a nice meal. To magnify the results, he says, pay attention to what you see, hear, and feel, both physically and emotionally, and smile. Then consciously tell yourself to “remember this” experience for which you feel grateful. Doing this helps the mind store the positive effects of the moment for future use.

Fresh eyes

"I think it pisses God off
if you walk by the color purple in a field
and don't notice it."

Alice Walker, The Color Purple

Sometimes we can get caught up in the rush of every day or the familiarity of our routines. We can fail to notice the beauty in ordinary experience. Imagine if we we visiting a place for the first time and were struck by the vibrancy, the energy and the qualities of the people. In that situation everything would seem more real, more alive. There would be such a sense of wonder.

Today let us look at each experience as if for the first time: Open our eyes, pause, wonder, notice the details, celebrate life.

An Evening Blessing

Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.

Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of colour
That fostered the brightness of day.

Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
Be excessively gentle with yourself.

Stay clear of those vexed in spirit.
Learn to linger around someone of ease
Who feels they have all the time in the world.

Gradually, you will return to yourself,
Having learned a new respect for your heart
And the joy that dwells far within slow time.

John O'Donoghue A Blessing for one who is exhausted

Gratitude

We are born helpless infants, creatures of pure need with little resource to give, yet we are fed, we are protected, we are clothed and held and soothed, without having done anything to deserve it, without offering anything in exchange. This experience, common to everyone who has made it past childhood, informs our deepest spiritual intuitions. Our default state is gratitude: it is the truth of our existence.

Charles Eisenstein

If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.

Meister Eckhart

Sitting

The birds have vanished
into the sky,
and now the last cloud
passes away.

We sit together,
the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.

Li Po

Mindfulness and attachment

There are interesting possible links between the practice of meditation and the healing of attachment patterns which are at the basis of all our relationships. Our early relationships with our primary caregivers laid down a pattern or paradigm which can be activated in later relationships. This paradigm can be very deeply ingrained in our unconscious and in the neural patterns of the brain. Luckily, like all neural patterns they can be changed, even if this takes a lot of time. One possible effect of meditation is that it allows the healing of excessive needs in relation to others by developing a greater contentment and balance with ourselves. This seems to be supported by the following quotation from Daniel Siegel on the brain and how it functions. Although it comes from a neurological point of view it seems to me to agree with the more Buddhist view of the mind's natural wakefulness which I referred to in the previous post.

Each of us needs periods in which our minds can focus inwardly. Solitude is an essential experience for the mind to organize its own processes and create an internal state of resonance. In such a state, the self is able to alter its constraints by directly reducing the input from interactions with others. As the mind goes through alternating phases of needing connection and needing solitude, the states of mind are cyclically influenced by combinations of external and internal processes. We can propose that such a shifting of focus allows the mind to achieve a balanced self-organizational flow in the states of mind across time. Respecting the need for solitude allows the mind to “heal” itself – which in essence can be seen as releasing the natural self-organizational tendencies of the mind to create a balanced flow of states. Solitude permits the self to reflect on engrained patterns and intentionally alter reflexive responses to external events that have been maintaining the dyadic dysfunction.

Daniel J. Siegal, The Developing Mind p., 235

On greeting the sun this morning

Today started cloudy and foggy. Low clouds over the mountains. However, one way of seeing our natural inner self is like the expansiveness of a clear blue sky. The troubles that cross our path each day can be seen as clouds crossing this clear sky. Just as the clouds can only temporarily block the sun but are not of the same strength as the sun, our problems are only temporary and what causes them to become suffering can be removed from the mind. So even with low fog this morning we can greet the sun which is always there. Even when troubles cross our path today we can drop into the natural calm which lies beneath.

Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who made the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and the crotchety –
best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light –
good morning, good morning, good morning.
Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.

Mary Oliver, Why I wake early

This too will pass

One of the more frequently quoted phrases coming from different wisdom traditions is "This too will pass" It is a reminder that we can find contentment in whatever circumstance if we glimpse the truth that all things will not last forever. Change is constant, people - friends and enemies - come and go in our lives, difficult situations will end. It allows us create space between ourselves and the situation and focus instead on why the situation has been presented to us and what we can learn from it.

It's not always easy to stay balanced but it helps me when I see that things are the way they are because of so many causes. The wisest way I can respond to my life is by working with it and responding to it and not struggling with it. This does not mean that we should not fight for the things that we can change or refuse to accept when others treat us badly. However, at times, there are things that I cannot change. "This too will pass" helps me see that all things have an ending. And when I see that endings can lead to new beginnings, I can endure difficulties more easily and let go of good things without resentment.

The effect of mindfulness on the Brain

From Dan Siegal, the author of The Mindful Brain:

Studies show that the ways we intentionally shape our internal focus of attention in mindfulness practice induces a state of brain activation during the practice. With repetition, an intentionally created state can become an enduring trait of the individual as reflected in long-term changes in brain function and structure. This is a fundamental property of neuroplasticity—how the brain changes in response to experience. Here, the experience is the focus of attention in a particular manner.

First, a “left-shift” has been noted in which the left frontal activity of the brain is enhanced following MBSR training. This electrical change in brain function is thought to reflect the cultivation of an “approach state,” in which we move toward, rather than away from, a challenging external situation or internal mental function such as a thought, feeling, or memory. Naturally, such an approach state can be seen as the neural basis for resilience.

Second, the degree of this left-shift is proportional to the improvement seen in immune function. Our mind not only finds resilience, but our body’s ability to fight infection is improved. At the University of California, Los Angeles, David Cresswell and his colleagues have found that MBSR improves immune function even in those with HIV.

Self and Others

Whatever happiness is in the world has arisen from a wish for the welfare of others;

Whatever misery there is has arisen from indulging selfishness.


Buddhist proverb

Letting the past go

Do not go after the past,

Nor lose yourself in the future. For the past no longer exists, And the future is not yet here.

By looking deeply at things just as they are, in this moment, here and now, the seeker lives calmly and freely. You should pay attentive to what is really going on today, for waiting until tomorrow is too late.

The one who knows how to live calmly and attentively night and day is the one who knows the best way to be independent.


Bhaddekaratta Sutra

Sabbath

When I was a child in New York City in the 1940s there were laws that attempted to legislate the Biblical injunction, “Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.” Businesses were closed. Shopping stopped. There were no convenience stores. People needed to remember, in advance of the Sabbath, to provide for the upcoming day of rest and spiritual reflection so that, on that day, they could rest. The community collectively caught its breath. Family members spent time with each other. They renewed connections. They visited neighbors.

I like to imagine that, whether or not people went to religious services, there was the possibility in that period of a pause for reflection. “What am I doing with my life?” “Is what I am doing good for me?” “Is it good for other people?” “Does my life make a difference in the world?” “Could my life make more of a difference in the world?”

All of the important fundamental questions in life seem to be waiting, so to speak, next on line at the top of the mind’s agenda, if only we give them the time and the space to present themselves.

Sylvia Boorstein

Loving life

Aren’t there moments
that are better than knowing something,
and sweeter? Snow was falling,
so much like stars
filling the dark trees
that one could easily imagine
its reason for being was nothing more than prettiness.

I suppose
if this were someone else’s story
they would have insisted on knowing
whatever is knowable – would have hurried
over the fields
to name it – the owl, I mean.

But it’s mine, this poem of the night,
and I just stood there, listening and holding out
my hands to the soft glitter
falling through the air.

I love this world,
but not for its answers.
And I wish good luck to the owl,
whatever its name –
and I wish great welcome to the snow,
whatever its severe and comfortless
and beautiful meaning.

Mary Oliver, Snowy night

Change

We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

Aristotle


"Talking about change is easy" a friend said to me recently, "but how easily do you actually accept it in your own life?" My answer was silence because I knew they were making a real point. It is easy to talk or write about working with difficulties and change in our lives, but the real test comes when things start to go in ways that we do not agree with. We tend to have a desire to plan out our lives, both for the long term and on a day-to-day basis. We have agendas and calendars that map out our lives, sometimes to the minute. It can help us feel in control, with plans like this. However, this is just an illusion. Things change, continually, big and small.

Mindfulness certainly helps us with the little changes: when there is a long queue in the supermarket, when traffic is bad, when meetings go on too long. We can easily work with the increasing tension in our bodies and notice the thoughts that arise. We can draw our breathing down into our body and root ourselves in the ground. Moments like these can become periods of practice, allowing us to inject pauses between the stressful event and our reaction.

However, how do we work with bigger life changes that affect our desire for love and meaning, the direction of our life, or with sudden moments that are beyond our control? It is easy for me to say that I will face it with a calm mind, but a sudden threatening event often means that my reaction comes out of a deep place within and can be narrow and defensive.

Does this mean that my mindfulness practice is useless and hypocritical or that it is of no benefit in working with real change? What I hope is that my practice begins to work on these deep fears so that even if the initial response was not perfect, space begins to enter gradually. Hard questions can be asked of us. Mindfulness does not consist in being perfect in our response each time but in trying to respond to each event with a benevolent heart. This is never easy when we feel our deepest wishes are threatened. However, if I try, in that moment or a day later, to drop into my heart and not just my nervous system, I feel better and sometimes more space enters.

I try to accept what happens. It might not be what I considered ideal, but it’s what life has given me, in this unpredictable world. I cannot control everything but I can work with my heart. I try to accept that this may not be what I wanted, but it is what I got. If I can do that, I notice that even though sadness remains, suffering is eased. The heart becomes more free to accept that there are other versions of reality than the one which I desired.

Gentleness

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand.
The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.

Henri Nouwen

Small Milestones

Today marked some small milestones in the life of this blog and of the website. There has been 1000 visits to these blog pages since it tentatively started on the 25th September while the Genevamindfulness website passed 3000 visits yesterday. Visitors have come from 26 different countries. Although these are modest numbers in the overall blogosphere, they do exceed what I anticipated when I started. The blog has a simple purpose, namely to provide information on mindfulness practice and to reflect day to day thoughts in the light of mindfulness and inner work. I thank you who return to check it out and hope that maybe you find some of the words on the blog useful.

Earthquake

The destructive earthquake in Haiti seems to have affected over a third of the population there. It is a terrible tragedy to afflict one of the poorest nations on the planet. It reminds us how the inequality of the world leaves the poorest the most vulnerable. Injustice and suffering like this leads us to wonder why and makes us feel powerless. It also lets us see how trivial some of our day-to-day concerns are in comparison to the life and death struggles of some.

These extreme physical phenomenon also remind us how fragile our physical life is, and how we can never have a certainty of safety. Accidents and illness happen frequently. We can say "goodnight" at the end of a day and are not guaranteed to resume contact again. It reminds us every life is made up of a series of things arising and passing away - beginnings and endings - and that coming to a personal understanding of this is vital in the development of wisdom.

Our mindfulness practice helps. Mindfulness is about seeing things as they actually are not as we imagine them to be, and one of its key insights, which we learn the first time we sit down to meditate, is that things change. However, I do not find it easy to really accept this insight and the calm that it can bring. I prefer to hold onto things, especially those which present themselves as pleasant. Even in simple day-to-day circumstances it is difficult to stay content: I can get easily upset, worry and find it hard to relax. From my work with people I know that I am not alone in this. Each day presents new circumstances. I often have difficulty adjusting to them and can become demanding or be confused. Change can often mean that I do not feel safe, until meditation, time and support soothes the mind and the heart. I find that meditation helps me in facing the big and small changes that afflict my life and when the world's suffering is brought close. Problems, in my life or in the world, are not necessarily solved but at least I feel more courageous in facing them.

Rain scatters plum petals
Weeping stains the earth
One can only take shelter
And wait for clearing

Tao Te Ching

More applications of Mindfulness

The Mind Body Awareness Project is another example of the way Mindfulness meditation is being adapted to work with different populations and in different settings. It was set up in the year 2000 to work with at-risk and incarcerated youth. It was founded in the belief that these young people have the potential to take control of their actions and fully transform their lives. It focuses on empowering them with the tools and competencies to overcome trauma, transform negative behaviors, and find real freedom from the inside. It was recently described as a “new national model for the rehabilitation of incarcerated youth".


The slogan of the MBA Project "We are literally one breath away from making better decisions" is based on the key role that breath awareness has in Mindfulness meditation and emotional intelligence exercises. Their programme aims to help helping teenagers to develop empathy, gain impulse control, and equip them with the tools they need to live meaningful lives. It tries to response to common issues seen in disaffected teenagers today - lack of contentment, meaning and motivation - which can lead to destructive behaviours and a disinterested "whatever" attitude.

This ‘whatever’ attitude has another side. It is the statement ‘whatever’ that can express their ambivalence towards everything they don’t like. ‘Whatever’ is how today’s youth express their extreme apathy towards teachers (and other adults) that cannot relate to them, and classrooms and institution that do not engage their interests. Breaking through this ‘whatever’ is the educator’s biggest challenge.

Courage

When we practice meditation, we express confidence in the simple yet powerful gesture of opening to whatever arises during our meditation session. We may come to our meditation with the hope of reducing our stress or perfecting our technique or maybe even attaining enlightenment. But we very soon discover that the practice requires that we drop such ambition and sit still on the cushion, letting go of our internal dialogue, opening to our world — very simply, very directly.

When we examine this experience of opening, we find that we are expressing a part of ourselves that we may tend to overlook: we are expressing our ability to trust ourselves completely. In order to open — in meditation and in life in general — we must let go of our familiar thoughts and emotions, we must step out from behind the safe curtain of our inner rehearsals and onto the stage of reality, even if it’s for just a brief moment. When we open on the cushion, we renounce our attachment to our emotional security blanket, over and over again. We drop our pretense and our story lines and stand naked in the midst of uncertainty — the very essence of confidence itself.

Maybe we would like to protect ourselves, but instead we have the courage to let go, and such courage naturally blossoms into the confidence to be fully open.

Michael Carroll Bringing Spiritual Confidence to the Workplace

Footprints

Again Nature provides lessons for the Inner life. The snow which seemed so abundant just days ago begins to melt. Is is sad when we see something, which made the landscape so magical, changing.


To what can our life on earth be likened?
To a flock of geese,
alighting on the snow.
Sometimes leaving a trace of their passage.

Su Shi

Mindfulness in Schools

There is an article in today's Times about the first school in England to teach mindfulness to pupils as a regular part of the curriculum. The Course has been designed in conjunction with Mark Williams, director of the Mindfulness Centre at Oxford, who collaborated with Jon Kabat Zinn on the book The Mindful way through Depression. The article summarizes the Course objectives as follows:

The course develops exercises to help to improve attention — rather than allowing the mind to be “hijacked” by emotional issues, regrets, worries about the past and future and other distractions. This can be done in a number of ways, such as by focusing on breathing, parts of the body or movement.

Mindfulness originated in Eastern meditation traditions such as Buddhism but is now an established secular discipline. A growing body of research supports wider use of the approach to address transient stress and deeper mental health problems, including recommendations from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence that it be offered on the NHS to patients suffering from depression.

The article is interesting. It can be found here : www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article6984113.ece

Stress and sleep

Stress is a leading factor in poor sleep, according to new research from Oklahoma State University. Their study, “Back Pain, Sleep Quality and Perceived Stress Following Introduction of New Bedding Systems,” published in the March 2009 Journal of Chiropractic Medicine, suggests that improved sleep quality not only reduces stress, but also helps us manage everyday stress. “When you’re stressed, and similarly when you are tired, every aspect of your waking life is affected, from work to personal relationships and even concentration,” says Better Sleep Council spokesperson Lissa Coffey. “Controlling stress and getting a good night’s rest start by evaluating your lifestyle and creating a healthy daily regimen that you can stick to".

Turning difficulty into awakening

The world we are born into is imperfect and unpredictable. Things change suddenly. We can have a clear direction for some days and then suddenly something surprises us, moving in an opposite direction to what was communicated. We live with finite human beings who send mixed messages, make mistakes, are confused, and act in ways that can hurt you. There is much to take in, and our abilty to predict what can happen is quite limited. We like to think so, but we are not omnipotent beings, and while we try to protect ourselves and maintain some order in our lives, we simply don’t have the ability to safeguard ourselves from all the hurts that can assail us.

We can learn from nature all around us these days. It does not behave in a predictable way or follow our wishes. Snow falls all around making travel difficult. Temperatures will fall to minus ten this evening which will make the journey to work tomorrow treacherous. The television news presents this as sudden unexpected upheavals. However we should not really be surprised that calamities and turmoil happen in nature and in our inner life, since this is the nature of the world we are born into.

Growth comes if we can understand that difficulties are inevitable in this life and when we try to work with them rather than run away from them. What are we afraid of a lot of the time? Often, it is the unknown. Meditation invites us to work with the unknown future in whatever form it comes up, no matter how unexpected. We know that we have a choice to be mindful. Whether it is the an economic crisis, or extreme weather conditions, or the death of a loved one, or changes in a relationship, all can be an opportunity for us to work with reality.

Mindfulness tells us that can train our minds to turn these unfavorable circumstances around to make them work to our advantage. It helps us to work with difficulties rather than allowing them to force us into a corner with no answers. It is part of our nature to resist change. Mindfulness helps to see that change is inevitable and that suffering comes from resiting it. Thus we try to treat difficulties as just part of nature rather than signs that things have gone wrong. Mindfulness helps us avoid the trap of thinking that the meaning of life is just to get everything working the way we want it. It shows us how to work with the fear of uncertainty.

I can’t offer you a finite list of things for you to do, nor can I tell you exactly how you can smile at fear. I’m working with turning up the edges of my mouth when I feel anxious. The advice I give myself is: Don’t avoid the opportunity to grin back at fear. And if you can dive into that empty feeling in the pit of your stomach, well, that would be excellent! We each have to find our own inner grin.

Pema Chodron

Stillness

"No snowflake falls in an inappropriate place.”
Zen Saying

All things happen for a reason. Everything can be our teacher. Snow falls quietly. It covers all in a blanket of stillness. We look out the window at the falling snow. It is easy to be at one with exactly what is happening here and now - simply being with the snow falling, simply being with what is in our lives.

A Choice

Life's energy is never static. It is as shifting, fluid, changing as the weather. How we relate to this dynamic flow of energy is important.

We can learn to relax with it, recognizing it as our basic ground, as a natural part of life;

or the feeling of uncertainty, of nothing to hold on to, can cause us to panic, and instantly a chain reaction begins.

We panic, we get hooked, and then our habits take over and we think and act in a very predictable way. The source of our fear is the unfilfillable longing for a lasting certainty and security, for something solid to hold on to. Unconsciously we expect that if we could just get a better job, a better partner, a better something, then our lives would run smoothly. We get caught up in a fearful, narrow holding pattern of avoiding any difficulty and continually seeking comfort.

Pema Chodron, Taking the Leap

Daring to dance

Life dances and you have to dance with it, whether it is taking you on a wonderful ride or is stepping on your toes. This is the necessary price and transcendent gift of being incarnate; alive in a body. But it is just life dancing. Life will move you in the rhythm and direction of its own nature. Each moment is a fresh moment in the dance, and if you are lost in clinging to the past or clinging to your fears of the future, you are not present for the dance.

Philip Moffitt

Within each one of us lies great potential. However, not every potential is fulfilled. Sometimes, it is a fear of change or a fear to take a risk which blocks the development. Fear can create a narrowness of attention and a loss of confidence in ourselves. We can doubt whether we have the strength to do what is before us, either big or small. Sometimes, therefore, courage is needed to reach our full potential or allow situations emerge. Developing our future happiness can demand that we take the risk to engage with our lives.

Every day we implicitly or unconsciously take refuge in something that we think will offer us security and protection. Sometimes we can unconsciously take refuge in fear, as it seems better not to reach out or not to try new things, It is easier to remain in our comfort zone. If we look we can notice that we do not set approach goals, but rather avoidance goals, where we are more focused on avoiding some things rather than moving towards things. Primarily making positive, approach goals or making mainly negative, avoidance goals can lead to the difference between a life that is thriving and a life that is focused on surviving. Often when a future outcome is not clear, the first instinct is to react in fear and move away. We can see ourselves starting to label the world - black and white, good or bad, doomed to fail or destined to succeed. This can lead to us becoming fixed. We can be dominated by experiences in the past, conscious or unconscious , or the fear of the future. We can get stuck, unable to see the rich, fluid potential of now.

How can we create a space where we’re not trapped by negativity and respond more fully to the richness offered in this moment? We begin by settling the mind, settling the body, and getting in touch with the breath. When we stay in the here-and-now, we can see things much more clearly. Now is now. There is not another now. If we realize that, we stop putting things off and engage in our life in a more wholehearted way.

Meditation helps our mind to not dwell on what might happen or on what we have lost. If we allow our minds to rest on those things all the time, we just worry more. Sometimes it looks as if worrying may be useful, but it tends only to give rise to more worrying. Rather we need to practice generosity and courage in our mind, which is limitless. Working with these positive emotions strengthens our self-confidence and reduces the fear of the future. They allow us step out and take the chance. Often the biggest risk is not the possibility of failing, it is not trying.

Letting go of fear

Awareness is born of intimacy. We can only fear what we do not understand and what we perceive from a distance. We can only find compassion and freedom in intimacy. We can be afraid of intimacy because we are afraid of helplessness; we fear that we don’t have the inner balance to embrace it without being overwhelmed. Yet each time we find the willingness to meet fear, we discover we are not powerless. Awareness rescues us from helplessness, teaching us to be helpful through our kindness, patience, resilience, and courage. Awareness is the forerunner of understanding, and understanding is the prerequisite to bringing suffering to an end.

Christine Feldman

Running

Many of us don’t allow ourselves to be relaxed.

Why do we always try to run and run, even while having our breakfast, while having our lunch, while walking, while sitting? There’s something pushing and pulling us all the time. We make ourselves busy in the hopes of having happiness in the future. In the sutra “Knowing the Better Way to Live Alone,” the Buddha said clearly, "Don’t get caught in the past, because the past is gone. Don’t get upset about the future, because the future is not yet here. There is only one moment for you to be alive, and that is the present moment. Go back to the present moment and live this moment deeply, and you’ll be free."

How do we liberate ourselves in order to really be in the here and the now? Meditation offers the practice of stopping. Let’s try not to run. We run because we’re too afraid.

Thich Nhat Hahn

Mindfulness and emotional well being

Some research has been done on the effects of meditation on the development of positive emotions, leading to a greater ability to function in everyday life. One urban study conducted by Roth and Robbins in 2004* and published in Psychosomatic Medicine, looked at the effect of the eight week Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programme on the development of positive emotions.

The results showed significant improvement in the participants’ emotional and social functioning, as well as their general health and vitality. Even though no impact on physical functioning was detected in this study, participants did report themselves more capable of working and performing their day-to-day activities. These improvements were reflected in an overall improvement in their health-related quality of life. It was noted that the ongoing effect of these benefits tended to increase with more frequent mindfulness practice, and were most pronounced in experienced mindfulness practitioners.

… with nothing to do, the mind is unable to prevent negative thoughts from elbowing their way to center stage worries about one’s love life, health, investments, family, and job are always hovering at the periphery of attention, waiting until there is nothing pressing that demands concentration. As soon as the mind is ready to relax, zap! the potential problems that were waiting in the wings take over.

Csikszentmihalyi, Flow


*“Mindfulness based stress reduction and health related quality of life: finding from a bilingual inner-city patient population”, Psychosomatic Medicine, 2004: 66(1):112-23

The Narrowness of Fear

In many ways it seems that humans change behaviours more easily in response to fear than in response to more positive emotions. We quickly get defensive, shut down and move away in response to real or perceived threats. And even some of the "positive" resolutions which are formed in these days are fear-driven, motivated by negative views of ourselves or comparisons with others or more desired states. It would seem that we have evolved to use fear and anxiety more regularly than more positive emotions, simply because they may be more immediately necessary for survival.

This could be partly because positive emotions like joy, love, calmness and gratitude do not immediately impact as forcibly as fear or anger. They do not register as strongly in the body, or push to to act in the same ways. All emotions can lead to changes in what has been called “momentary thought-action repertoires" – the range of potential actions the body and mind are prepared to take. However, the negative emotions have a specific function of promoting survival. This means that when we consistently practice negative emotions, such as fear, our thought-action activity significantly narrows, focusing on avoiding and defense. Since fear is somewhat "easier" to follow, some psychologists argue that we need to learn skills to keep fear in check and develop positive emotions.

Positive emotions such as joy, gratitude, and contentment, seem to broaden a person's thoughts and actions, and help us approach what we need in order to grow fully. These emotions broaden, build and open people's mindsets, enabling more creative and flexible thinking. Thus they expand our thinking and behaving capacities. These positive emotions also seems to effect our overall health and even our recovery from illness. Research has found that contentment and joy speed the recovery of a patient after illnesses and after the onset of certain diseases. Using positive emotions seems to be at the heart of what allows people to bounce back from hardship and become stronger than before. Not only do they effect the individual in the present but they seem to lead to better mood and functioning in the future. Again, studies show that people who increase their positive emotions develop better collaborations with others, their resilience and optimism strengthens, and they become more content with life, compared with people who do nothing to experience them more frequently.

Cultivating positive emotions therefore would seem to be a necessary skill, if only to loosen the effect of negative emotions which can dominate a person's body and mind. How can we do this? It seems that the key is to start in our actual current circumstances. Developing the ability to be truly open to what actually is happening in our lives and celebrating the good things found there, seems to be crucial. Not surprisingly meditation has been found to boost positive emotions, as has walking or running in nature, dancing, or reading a new book.

Simple changes in self-talk can also help. Self-limiting talk, - such as “I can’t handle this!” or “This is impossible!” - is particularly damaging because it increases the stress in a particular situation and stops the person from looking for solutions. It is better to turn such thoughts into questions. Thinking “How can I handle this?” or “How is this possible?” already opens up more space and allows the imagination seek new possibilities.

Learning new habits

At this time of year people often focus on new habits of behaviour, changing existing patterns or learning new skills. For example, some seek to more exercise, some to eat more healthily or learn a new skill, or maybe even meditate every day. The question is, how often does it need to be performed before it no longer requires huge effort or massive self-discipline? How many days or weeks does it take for a new habit to become ingrained?

The popular myth is that it takes somewhere between 21 and 28 days. However there does not seem to be any real evidence for this number at all. The figure might have originated with the observations of a surgeon, a Dr Maltz, who wrote that amputees took, on average, 21 days to adjust to the loss of a limb. He abstracted from this to argue that all people take 21 days to adjust to any major life changes.

Now unless the change you intended for 2010 involves major surgery, this does not seem to be the case. More helpful is the study carried out by Phillippa Lally and colleagues from University College London in 2009. She did some research on 96 people who were interested in forming a new habit, such as eating fruit with lunch or doing a 15 minute jog every day. The participants were asked each day how automatic their new behaviours felt. For example they were asked whether the behaviour was 'hard not to do' and could be done 'without thinking'.

On average, the participants reported that the behaviours felt automatic after 66 days, or after over two months. In other words it had become a habit. This was the average, with some reporting as early as 20 days and others 254 days. It seems related to the type of new behaviour being tried, some being harder to acquire than others. Finally it seems that some people in the study were slower than others in their attempts to start new behaviours, suggesting that there may be personalities more resistant to change.

A bit different, then, from the popular optimism which infects people around New Years Eve and which momentarily presents itself as the answer to all our discontents.

Noise and silence

For some people today is the last day of the holidays before the return to work tomorrow. After a period of rest it will be back to the stress and rush of deadlines and meetings, or commuting, and noise. Often the background noise of the city is so pervasive that we can get to a stage that we do not even notice it. As the continual playing of Christmas music in shops over the past few weeks demonstrates, we can't seem to live without some background sound. We have created an acceptance of our noisy world in spite of some evidence that it is making us ill physically and psychologically.

For example, a study by Cornell University published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2001 found that low-level office noise increases health risks and lowers task motivation for people who work there. The study found that workers in a noisy office experienced significantly higher levels of stress and made 40 percent fewer attempts to solve an unsolvable puzzle than a similar group in quiet working conditions. The effect of this stress meant that the same workers were less likely to take breaks or make healthy adjustments which would help them in the long term.

As one of the researchers, Gary Evans, an expert on environmental stress, stated: "One possible reason is that under stress, people focus in on their main task or activity. This focusing leads to less flexibility in considering alternatives during decision making, for example. Perhaps if people are working at a task and are under more stress, they become more focused on the task itself, not being as cognizant as they should be to change their posture or take a break."

In many cases we have no control over our external environment of the noise of a city. However we do have choices in our internal environment and in our own homes. Setting aside time for meditation creates an interior silence. However we can support this by reducing some of the noise that surrounds us, turning off the radio in the car or the TV in the house. We can start this slowly, for short periods, gradually increasing the length of time. It may be that soon we will begin to look forward the periods of silence we have built into our day and even want more. Research supports the fact that this is a step towards becoming more relaxed and less tense even in the midst of our noisy world.

How is it possible to reach inner silence? Sometimes we are apparently silent, and yet we have great discussions within, struggling with imaginary partners or with ourselves. Calming our souls requires a kind of simplicity: "I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvellous for me." Silence means recognising that my worries can’t do much. Silence means leaving what is beyond my reach and capacity. A moment of silence, even very short, is like a holy stop, a sabbath rest, a truce from worries.

Taize The Value of Silence

Resolutions III: Small Steps

Big goals can be discouraging. They can sometimes be set so far out of reach that we get discouraged at the first setback and give up on them altogether. That’s why it seems that gradual, small steps work better in achieving greater life changes. Setting a series of small, attainable goals helps us better achieve that big goal.

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, professor of psychology at Yale University has studied extensively the relationship between mood, motivation and thinking patterns. She has particularly looked at rumination, when people focus more on negative aspects of their achievements and life and their “possible causes and consequences.” According to her, people who ruminate get stuck in a cycle of thinking about their achievements and their problems and, as a result, make things worse by creating negative thinking, blaming and a decreased ability to problem solve. Perhaps her best known book is "Women who Think Too Much: How to Break Free of Overthinking and Reclaim Your Life"

This thinking pattern can affect the way we approach positive change, such as resolutions around health or attitudes toward work. Consequently Nolen-Hoeksema recommends that we focus on small achievable goals, make one specific by writing it down, and rewarding ourselves when we achieve it. Her advice is found in an article on today's CNN website entitled "10 ways to get motivated for change in 2010"

Let's say you want to work on being more optimistic this year. Nolen-Hoeksema recommends imagining what you would be like if you were optimistic. Imagine yourself going through a day at work if you were optimistic and confident, then write that down in great detail. Now, you have specific aspects of that ideal of optimism to work toward. Pick one thing that the optimistic you is doing that you're not, and start working in that direction.

The rest of the advice can be found at http://edition.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/12/29/motivation.new.years.resolutions/index.html?iref=allsearch

Living the New Year fully

A Bright morning, a clear start to the New Year.

A nice quotation from Mary Oliver on getting the most out of each moment and each day:

When it's over, I want to say:
all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Mary Oliver, When Death Comes

Setting out

The soul is dyed the colour of its thoughts.
Think only on those things that are in line with your principles and can bear the light of day.

The content of your character is your choice.

Day by day, what you do is who you become.
Your integrity is your destiny -
it is the light that guides your way.

Heraclitus (c.540 - c.475 BC)